Everybody has a favorite screen romance that is ostensibly about
something else, from “Gone With the Wind” (Civil War, anyone?) to
“Titanic” (something about a boat sinking). “Time After Time” has a
plot that concerns two famous real-life Victorian-era figures – the
influential science-fiction writer H.G. Wells and the serial killer
Jack the Ripper – and the notion that both men wind up in present-day
San Francisco. It’s a perfectly good and well-executed premise, but
what makes “Time After Time” shine is its love story. The chemistry
between Malcolm McDowell as the out-of-his-element Wells and Mary
Steenburgen as the modern woman who sweeps him off his feet is so
undeniable that it carries along everything around it.

“Time” starts in 1893 London, when a tipsy streetwalker encounters a
gentleman in a top hat. Unfortunately for the woman, her new customer
is Jack the Ripper. Meanwhile, in a better neighborhood in the city,
writer and inventor Wells is announcing to a group of his highly
skeptical friends that he’s invented a time machine – albeit he hasn’t
worked up the nerve to test the device himself. Only Dr. John Leslie
Stevenson (David Warner), a late arrival to the group, seems intrigued.
The police come by the house, seeking the prostitute’s killer, and find
Stevenson’s medical bag covered with blood. Stevenson, aka Jack the
Ripper, flees the scene and the century by using Wells’ machine. Wells
is not only horrified by the discovery of his friend’s murderous shadow
side but by the thought that he’s allowed a murderer to travel into the
future – which Wells foresees as a peaceful and harmonious utopia.
Wells believes he has no choice but to rescue the world to come from
Jack the Ripper, so he enters the machine and winds up in 1979 San
Francisco.

Of course, Wells is in for a rude awakening as to the actual state of
things in his imagined perfect future, while Stevenson’s perversity and
violence seem positively routine. Wells is diverted from his pursuit
partly by the mistaken belief that Stevenson is dead and partly because
he meets bank clerk Amy Robbins (Steenburgen), who proceeds to bowl him
over with her non-Victorian straightforwardness and open interest.

Up until the introduction of Amy in Chapter 13, about half an hour into
the film, “Time After Time” is simply droll and charming. McDowell,
playing his first unambiguous big screen middle-class good guy here
(he’d previously portrayed a lot of working-class rebels and some
outright badasses, most famously Alex in “A Clockwork Orange”), revels
in Wells’ twinned sweetness and stuffiness, successfully projecting
extraordinary intelligence that coexists comfortably with the
character’s straightforward innocence. Warner, using his intimidating
height for full effect, makes what could have been a dull villain into
a figure almost as much to be pitied as he is to be feared – he shows
us that the Ripper is a man both driven and lost. In their scenes
together, McDowell and Warner have a palpable rapport even as
adversaries – we believe these men have known each other for years.
This is borne out by the commentary track, where McDowell explains that
he worked onstage and palled around afterwards with Warner when Warner
was already a star and McDowell was a bit player. Like their
characters, the two English actors were on unfamiliar turf in “Time
After Time,” playing leads in their first Hollywood movie. It’s
possible that under different circumstances, McDowell and Warner might
still have turned in the same performances, but McDowell talks as
though he believes the production situation contributed to the
chemistry between the players and the scenes suggest he’s right.

If the chemistry between McDowell and Warner is exciting, it’s
electrifying between McDowell and Steenburgen. They two gaze at each
other as though caught between urgent action and the kind of fascinated
contemplation that could go on forever – the word “enraptured” was
probably coined to describe what we see here. In Chapter 17,
Steenburgen’s Amy seems so overwhelmed during a public lunch that she
seems ready to burst while making small talk – McDowell explains on the
commentary track that just before the scene was filmed, he’d told
Steenburgen for the first time that he loved her. There are plenty of
movie romances with bigger sweep and scope, but few if any have this
kind of inarguable, transcendent emotion. We feel like we’re watching
two people falling in love because that’s precisely what we’re seeing.
Again, maybe McDowell and Steenburgen could have acted it without
feeling a thing and the scenes would still be beguiling, but “Time
After Time” has an air to it that isn’t quite like any other movie –
there’s something about the juxtaposition of the absolute fantasy of
the plot mechanisms with the urgency and intimacy of the acting that
sets it apart.

It helps that director/writer Nicholas Meyer has given the characters
some delightful dialogue exchanges that draw us in ever deeper, and San
Francisco looks gorgeous, with just the right mixture of exoticism (to
Wells’ bewildered eyes) and mundanity (for the audience). The
widescreen print transfer is handsome and mostly very clean, although
there’s a bit of picture glitter on Wells’ tweed suit in Chapter 14 and
a few old-looking shots in Chapter 15. Don’t freak out about the white
lines in Chapter 8, though – they’re part of the time-travel effect.

The special effects in “Time After Time” are relatively few, important
to the storytelling but not the film’s main selling point. For the most
part, they look like better-rendered versions of old “Star Trek” TV
effects (aptly enough, Meyer went on to direct “Star Trek II: The Wrath
of Khan” and “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”). Gore is at an
all-time minimum for a story in which Jack the Ripper plays a principal
role – a brief shot of splashes of blood on a wall and a severed hand
are as extensive as it gets. This reviewer likes blood as much as the
next hard-core horror film fan, but in this instance, discretion suits
the overall tone.

The stereo surround sound is very good, although there’s a bit of
abrupt level-shifting in Chapter 14. The best effects can be found in
Chapters 31, 32 and 33, with police sirens that move right to left,
realistic tire squeals and finally a very authentic echo in a vast
outdoor space. The balance between dialogue, ambient effects and music
score is handled very well. The commentary track is two-channel, with
Meyer seeming to reside in both main speakers, while McDowell favors
the right. It is invaluable and illuminating, although there are long
stretches where the pair are mutually silent and the soundtrack comes
up full – Meyer at one point admits he’s so caught up in watching the
movie again that he’s forgotten to speak.

A word here about the Miklos Rozsa orchestral score: Meyer goes on at
length about his love for the huge, old-fashioned, melodramatic music,
so there’s no question that it’s part of his vision, but the score
often tends to overstate the emotion of scenes to the point of nearly
swamping them, at odds with the overall lighter touch of the material.

“Time After Time” has its flaws – some story details are a bit fuzzy
(we really should get a brief clip of Stevenson faking his death
instead of having to surmise what’s happened) and a crucial bit of
staging at the end gets fudged. However, neither minor complaints,
multiple viewings nor the passage of time can erode the film’s ultimate
sense of enchantment. “Time After Time” is a timelessly lovely love
story.

more details

sound format:

English Dolby Stereo Surround; French Mono

aspect ratio(s):

1.85:1

special features:

Audio
Commentary by Director/Writer Nicholas Meyer and Actor Malcolm
McDowell; Essay on Time Travel Movies; Cast and Director Film
Highlights; Theatrical Trailer; Trailers for 1960 and 2002 Versions of
“The Time Machine”; English, French, Spanish and Portuguese Subtitles;
English Closed-Captioning